[Bargain corner] Ellipsis: Dual Vision

New York artist Stephen Posen photographs the everyday world with a painter's eye, capturing compositions that often blur the lines between realism and abstraction. The 174 images compiled in his first book of photographs, Ellipses: Dual Visions, represent a broad range of locations and subjects - ranging from Tonle Sap Lake in Cambodia to a flea market in rural Pennsylvania, a vending machine of rubber balls to a contorted Barbie doll, all culled from decades of photographs in Posen's archives. The artist has arranged these images, taken in very diverse places and disparate times, in pairs, based on form, content, or some obscure magnetism, leaving the viewer to conjure a bridge between the two. The elliptical space between the images, like the series of dots that represents an omitted piece of text, becomes a third entity, pregnant with possibility. As art editor Scott Indrisek writes in the introduction to the book, -2 distinct photographs are made into strange bedfellows, and that's the joy: Finding connections where many see only a random chaos of image.- The photographs collected here are playful, poetic, and endlessly compelling. They demonstrate the mastery and intuition of Posen's eye, both as a photographer and an editor, teasing elusive connections from the visual glut of the modern world.